Generally speaking, disease management refers to a wide range of activities that may affect a patient's health status. These activities include programs to improve a patient's compliance with their treatment regimen, and helping the patient adjust their regimen according to evidence-based treatment guidelines. The goal of these programs is to attempt to maintain or improve the patient's health status and quality of life, and to reduce the total costs of health care.
One approach is to identify and provide a variety of appropriate services to patients that are suitable for a certain program. Examples of such services include periodic phone calls to a patient to monitor the status of the patient, personalized goal-oriented feedback on the patient's self care, access to nurse call centers, and educational materials. Some of these programs attempt to modify services based on data obtained from the patient's self reports and administrative claims. These programs attempt to help patients identify regimens, manage their symptoms, self-monitor their conditions, and comply with their treatment. The drawbacks of this type of approach include the enormous resources necessary to provide these human-based services, and the lack of timely, appropriate, and accurate patient data to provide appropriate services. For example, a single case manager can only assist a limited number of patients. As a result, such a case manager may, for example, be able to contact a patient only once a month and may be forced to rely on out-dated data for the patient.
An alternative approach for disease management is to use a system that provides corrective action to a patient based on limited information provided by the patient. For example, a diabetes patient can provide their current glucose value using an electronic patient-operated apparatus, and the system can recommend a corrective action to the patient based on the application of formulas well known in the art. A corrective action can be either administration of an extra insulin dose or consumption of carbohydrates. A drawback of this approach is that it fails to provide customized disease management for each individual patient. Similarly, the formulas that can be applied for any patient part of the general population do not take into account the complete dynamics of a particular's patient's disease and the corrective actions advised to a patient are limited. As a result, a patient is denied the optimal treatment recommendations that can only be targeted for a particular patient. Finally, the success of the system is wholly dependent on a proactive and conscientious patient.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for an improved solution for disease management. In particular, there is a need for systems and methods for effective disease management that can develop recommendations for a patient based on the particular patient's data.